February 11, 2011

With the Barnsley by-election set for 3 March, the British National Party appears increasingly uninterested in promoting its faux family image and the party’s diminishing number of members in Yorkshire are once more calling into question the judgement of their leader, Nick Griffin.

The surprise appointment of Ian Kitchen as a replacement for the highly regarded Chris Beverley as the new Yorkshire and Humber regional organiser in January, with Simon Goodricke, one of Griffin’s regular bodyguards, as his deputy, brought to the fore one of the worst kept secrets in the BNP’s recent history.

Kitchen, from Hemsworth near Pontefract in West Yorkshire, has long been regarded by members as an oddball and a Griffin sycophant. Most see him as a harmless crank who allegedly suffers from brain injuries resulting from a car accident.

Kitchen attracted attention for his strange and rather awkward looking cameo appearance at the launch of the BNP’s 2010 election manifesto in Stoke-on-Trent. Standing behind Griffin and Simon Darby, then the party’s deputy leader and a local parliamentary candidate, he appeared with what looked for all intents and purposes a saucepan on his head as he mimicked a poor man’s pantomime St George.

Alongside his promotion to regional organiser, Kitchen and his fourth wife Linda have been entrusted with running and promoting the party’s annual booze-fuelled punch-up, bean feast and “family orientated” Red, White and Blue festival. Their appointment has the potential to cause acute embarrassment for the party and adds to suspicions among members that the leadership is running Yorkshire region into the ground.

For alongside promoting the BNP’s alleged clean-cut image and Christian beliefs, Mrs Kitchen is a hard-core porn actress and the star attraction on a number of websites that show and sell films for a particular market in mature and genitally pierced “grannies”. There are also a number of explicit photographs of Linda, who has the word “slave” tattooed across her abdomen, engaged in sexual acts not with her husband but with alleged and consenting strangers.

The availability of the photographs and film, which rejoices in the title Freddie’s British Granny F*** 15, on a number of porn websites has long been an open secret in the BNP and one of which Griffin is believed to be aware. Their explicit and extreme nature prevents Searchlight from reproducing the evidence here.

The appointment of Kitchen irked Eddy Butler, the unsuccessful BNP leadership challenger, who has encountered Kitchen at the BNP’s offices at the European Parliament in Brussels, where Griffin sits as an MEP for the North West and Andrew Brons, a former chairman of the National Front, represents Yorkshire and the Humber.

Linda Kitchen with husband Ian and stepson also called Ian

According to Butler, Griffin lied to Yorkshire members when he claimed he did not know that Kitchen had allegedly been jailed for violence and “gives out DVDs of his wife engaging in hard core pornographic acts with strangers”.

Certainly the language used by the film’s promoters to market it is not what one would expect from the self-appointed moral guardians of the nation. Mrs Kitchen is described as a “slutty granny” among other degrading and offensive descriptions for women.

Interestingly, Butler claims that the disgraced Barnsley Labour MP Eric Illsley was forced to resign as a result of the work of the former BNP “sleaze buster” Michael Barnbrook, now out of favour with Griffin. Kitchen helped kick off the Barnsley by-election campaign for the BNP by attempting to charge £1 entrance to a party meeting. Perhaps this is typical of the ideas Kitchen brings to the table in a now morally as well as financially bankrupt BNP.

Goodricke, Kitchen’s deputy, is also far from a fine upstanding member of the community. One of Griffins regular bodyguards, Goodricke was thrown out of the police service in disgrace and conned an 80-year-old woman out of £1,000 as he awaited trial for perverting the course of justice.

The former West Midlands Detective Constable, described as “an unremarkable detective”, was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment at Birmingham Crown Court in January 1998. He was found guilty of perverting the course of justice after he tipped off fraudsters attempting to swindle £100 million from Columbian drug barons.

An international police investigation was under way but collapsed after the tip-off. Goodricke was a gambling addict who had borrowed £200,000 from one of the fraudsters, to whom he later gave insider information.

While on bail he tricked a pensioner into loaning him £1,000. He had first met her some years earlier while investigating a broken window at her house. When Goodricke tried to beg more money from her she became distressed and wrote a letter asking him to leave her alone. He was said to have duped her with a sob story telling her he owed £3,500 on his mortgage and his house was about to be repossessed.

The court heard however that he was not in arrears and there had been no threat of repossession.

Goodricke was dismissed from West Midlands Police in 1996, two years after being suspended on disciplinary charges.